Annual outdoor mass to be celebrated Sunday

Thursday

Sep 27, 2012 at 5:00 AM

By BARBARA LANG

Fall is in the air and the leaves are beginning to show color.

Enjoy the season with members of the Catholic Community of Holmes County as they celebrate an alfresco mass at 4 p.m. on Sunday, Sept. 30 at the site of the former St. Joseph's Mission. Take chairs and a potluck dish and dress for the weather. In case of rain, the mass will be held at Saints Peter and Paul in Glenmont.

The site of the mission on Township Road 16, a few miles west of the intersection of State Route 520 and County Road 75, was cleaned up several years ago.

"If you didn't know it was there you would never find it. It was strictly woods, grapevines and multiflora rose. Now you can see the foundation of the church and the gravestones," said a neighbor Sharon Martin, who, along with her husband, Tim, helped clean up the one acre lot working with many members of Saints Peter and Paul. They still help by mowing grass.

St. Joseph's mission was founded around 1847 by a small community of Catholic settlers of German, French and Irish descent which sprang up in the Alum Rock Country, about four miles southwest of what is now Glenmont.

This community was named at various times St. Joseph's Greer, Black Creek and Napoleon throughout the years. There people built their pioneer chapel out of logs, called it St. Joseph's and it was entered under this name in the early record books.

In the 1840s, the legendary missionary Jean Baptist Lamy, who was later immortalized in Willa Cather's famous novel "Death Comes to the Archbishop," served as pastor to about 300 families in what was to become the northern Columbus Diocese. Father Lamy traveled by foot and on horseback to his forest parishes in Coshocton, Holmes, Knox and Licking counties as well as other Ohio sites.

The young Frenchman thought nothing of walking the 24-mile round trip from missions in Danville and Mount Vernon during a single afternoon, according to his biographer.

When the pioneer log chapel became inadequate, the people united together and under Father Darcy built Saints Peter & Paul, in 1857. It is the present stone church in Glenmont.

A descendent of one of these original parishioners, Joe Dete was passionate about preserving the site of the log church. "The older members of Saints Peter & Paul knew where the mission used to be. My great grandfather settled in this area in 1852. He attended mass there until the new church was built. Some of my relatives still live on his farm and are members of the parish today," he said.